by Sean McGlynn
About 200 heads of his enemies were laid at Dermot’s feet. When he had turned each one over and recognized it, out of an excess of joy he jumped three times in the air with arms clasped over his head, and joyfully gave thanks to the Supreme Creator as he loudly revelled in his triumph. He lifted up to his mouth the head of one he particularly loathed, and taking it by the ears and hair, gnawed at the nose and cheeks – a cruel and most inhuman act.42
If that was the mood in the literary world, how much more vicious things would have been on the battlefield. It fostered a sense of total war, in which the killing of the enemy without distinction between soldiers and non-combatants became virtuous. It was the same over four hundred years later. On the eve of Flodden in 1513, fought on the Scottish border, a Gaelic poet encourages such guerre à outrance:
Let us make harsh and mighty warfare against the English…. The roots from which they grow, destroy them, their increase is too great, and leave no Englishman alive after you nor Englishwoman there to tell the tale. Burn their bad coarse women, burn their uncouth offspring, and burn their sooty houses, and rid us of the reproach of them. Let their ashes float downstream after burning their remains, show no mercy to a living Englishman, O … deadly slayer of the wounded.43
This was a call for a war of extermination in which there was no room for compassion for the wounded or even women, as they would produce only more English enemies. As Matthew Strickland has commented on this passage, ‘[I]t is impossible to envisage such words coming from an Anglo-French courtly poet extolling the chivalric virtues of his patron’.44 Not that English soldiers would be so sensitive. Unsurprisingly, those at Flodden reciprocated Scottish sentiment. According to a contemporary source, many ‘Scottish prisoners could and might have been taken but they were so vengeable and cruel in their fighting that when the Englishmen had the better of them they would not save them, though it so were that diverse Scots offered great sums of money for their lives’.45 Such was the spiral of violence that sometimes not even money could break it.
It has been suggested that the anti-Scottish feeling in English writing of the twelfth century was provoked by repugnance at the Scots’ way of warfare, which was perceived as little more than slaving raids. This is a partial explanation. More obviously, the ethnic hatred on both sides was generated predominantly by war. This hatred was a form of aggressive, nascent national identity. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘The effect of war on nationalist feelings is well documented; such feelings in England by the twelfth century had been nurtured by wars against the Celtic fringe.’46 Some medievalists have commented on the patriotism displayed in the works of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. England had long held a sense of the ‘other’, a national identity shaped by reference to what people were not. Thus, the Old English word for Wales – Wealhas – means ‘foreigners’. Contrary to the chronocentrism of some modern historians following the Gellner school of nationalism, national identity grew strongly in medieval England and, later, France, with war being the driving force in both cases (Anglo-French war, in fact). It was this added ingredient that made the Hundred Years War so deadly at times.
Scottish tactics and strategy were largely dictated by necessity. Their aristocracy, and hence the upper echelons of their army, were more similar than dissimilar to their English counterparts, and there were close courtly connections; any cultural gaps quickly narrowed over the twelfth century. Scottish campaigns did not consist merely of killing, pillaging and enslaving, but, especially in the border regions, of sieges, too: David’s dogged and persistent preoccupation with Wark finally paid off when a starved garrison surrendered towards the end of 1138. However, ravaging was the primary tactic and, as the first treaty of Durham shows with Stephen granting Carlisle and Doncaster to David, another means by which to gain strongholds. The marked battle avoidance of David, hastily beating a retreat at the mere rumour of an advancing English army, was a practical response to the better armour, training and equipment of the English. His own infantry, lightly armoured and poorly disciplined, was no match for the English, as the Battle of the Standard bloodily demonstrated. But the further the Scots advanced into England, the less important sieges became (many castles were simply bypassed), as the intent was simply to plunder and thereby apply pressure in the hope of being bought off with territorial concessions. In this sense, a campaign became a raid, with the intention of moving as quickly, as destructively and as profitably as possible. The fate of the non-combatants – their homes, their goods, their lives – was not due to collateral damage but to the objectives of war.
How was it that King David, anxious to be esteemed as a chivalrous knight and considered ‘civilized’ by William Malmesbury, allowed his troops to act so homicidally and so brutally? As we have seen repeatedly, even the most renowned exponents of kingly chivalry did not hesitate to indulge in stark, brutal acts of carnage in their dedication to the military imperative. David was no different. Part of the problem was, as always, financial. Scotland, like Wales and Ireland, was not as economically developed as England; consequently, there were fewer coins circulating there. Rank-and-file Scottish troops rarely received wages and therefore depended on plunder and slavery instead. Anything that had a value and could be moved was taken as a form of pay. And as poverty was endemic on the Celtic fringe, there were always men ready to join a raiding party in search of relative riches. As with the Welsh, ‘[T]hese were men who lived by and for war, and for whom the equation of peace and prosperity was the very reverse of the truth’.47 If David had not let these men loose on the rampage, then his armies would have been greatly reduced in strength as he did not have the means to pay them.
Booty was the concern of all soldiers, including the most noble of knights; but for the main infantry contingent of a Scottish army it was the be-all and end-all. Both Henry of Huntingdon and the author of the Gesta Stephani claim that King David gave specific orders to his troops to wage unrestrained war in the most savage way. This assertion is as hard to prove as it is to disprove; either way, David clearly understood what the Scottish style of warfare entailed and, indeed, depended on it to make gains. With understanding comes complicity. The King may have regretted the excesses of his troops, only to protest that there was little he could do to restrain them, suggesting that the best way to prevent them causing such misery was to end the war by coming to generous terms with him. It is a common ploy throughout military history. For David to wage war he relied on troops that were geared towards savagery, slavery and slaughter. As Keith Stringer has concluded: ‘Their terror tactics were on a scale not experienced since the Conqueror’s notorious Harrying of the North of 1069–70, and had the clear aim of so demoralizing Stephen and his northern supporters that they would be forced to accept Scottish conquests, or at least a peace that went some way towards meeting David’s demands.’48
It was no different in the war of 1173–4, when Jordan of Fantosme has King William of Scotland calling for widespread ravaging, ‘leaving not a house nor a church standing’ and ‘killing all the men’.49 Some efforts were made at restraint in the Edwardian wars a century later, but they seem no less savage. And so it remained into the sixteenth century at Flodden.
This section has restricted itself to English reporting of Scottish atrocities. It therefore paints a very one-sided picture in which the Scots were the sole perpetrators of these horrors. That was certainly not the case in reality. A major theme of this book is that there were few, if any, medieval commanders who did not commit what we today would call a war crime; another theme is that violence begets violence. Thus the English assuredly committed their share of atrocities throughout the Anglo-Scottish wars in the Middle Ages, so it is worth reminding ourselves of the letter that John Balliol, King of Scotland, wrote to Edward I in 1296 renouncing his homage, using familiar language:
You yourself, and others of your realm (to your own knowledge, for surely you know not to be ignorant of what they do) have (as everyone knows) inflicted over an
d over again, by naked force, grievous and intolerable injuries, slights, and wrongs upon us and the inhabitants of our realm … by taking away, and receiving within your realm, both by land and sea, our chattels and those of our subjects; by slaying merchants and other inhabitants of our realm, and by forcibly seizing the men of our realm, taking them into your own…. For now you have come to the frontiers of our realm in a warlike array … and have crossed beyond into our realm, and brutally committed acts of slaughter and of burning.50
What did David’s murderous invasions achieve? In some ways, quite a lot (although this is an area of dispute). By the second treaty of Durham in April 1139, David was effectively bought off for the time being. David’s lordship of Carlisle and the rights of his son to the earldom of Huntingdon were confirmed, and his son was also granted the earldom of Northumberland. It is notable that, after his defeat at the Battle of the Standard, David retreated to Carlisle and not to Scotland. Here he held a major council with a papal legate and the leading men of his kingdom, lay and secular, and thus Carlisle was ‘obviously treated as a chief place of Scottish government’.51 Basically, Stephen acknowledged in the treaty the areas that David had made his own, freeing the English king to concentrate on his many troubles elsewhere.
Unfortunately for him, these troubles saw him in prison after his defeat at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, leaving David to fill the political vacuum in the North by simply taking over government there without conflict. The northern chroniclers, who had so vehemently condemned the Scottish king and his troops for their atrocities, now fell over themselves in praising their new peace-loving, pious, virtuous and compassionate lord and master.
King John’s Winter Campaign, 1215–16
The war of Magna Carta that began in England in 1215 was a long time in gestation, and King John was its feckless father. His oppressive and arbitrary government imposed a severe financial burden on his subjects, whom John exploited in an effort to gain the means by which he might recover his lost territories in France. These losses – above all, Normandy, which Philip Augustus annexed in 1204 after his stunning victory at Château Gaillard – cast a huge shadow over John’s reign, one that could only be cast off by tangible results on the battlefield.
The help and support of his barons would have been a great advantage to John, but the King preferred to place what little trust he had in mercenaries. This required a lot of money, which John sought to extract from his barons, thereby dangerously alienating them: dispossessions ‘by will’, hostage-taking, fines, duplicate charters of sole ownership issued to different people and other unscrupulous measures left John isolated. He exacerbated his problems further by mishandling patronage, granting prized offices to foreigners and new men. Many of John’s most intransigent and unrelenting agents were placed in the North, building up huge resentment there; it is no surprise that the ‘northerners’ are to be found heading the consequent rebellion.
John’s singularly unpleasant character further reinforced his deserved reputation for being completely untrustworthy. This traditional view has, until recently, held sway for centuries. However, a revisionist school from the 1960s, propounding the idea that good kingship was less about chivalric charisma and military leadership, and more about keeping a nice tidy set of bookkeeping records, argued that John was in fact a pretty good king, after all. He was not. The fact that John was such a keen bureaucrat is a reflection of his failures elsewhere; he managed to find some useful employment in tax-raising schemes, but in little else. Thankfully, a counter-revisionist attack has attempted to set the academic record straight, although a popular more positive view of John still persists.
John deservedly had a very hostile press from contemporaries in England. Biased (but well-informed) monastic chroniclers heaped censure on him. Richard of Devizes describes him as a raging madman; the Barnwell chronicler labels him ‘a pillager of his own people’; Matthew Paris believed that in dying John defiled Hell. Secular sources confirm these judgements. The biographer of the royalist William Marshal characterizes him as a suspicious and resentful ruler, heedless to reason, and blinded by pride. Even Anonymous of Béthune, whose master fought for John in the wars of this time, cannot find anything positive to say in his simple and damning summary: ‘He had too many bad qualities’. A wholly unchivalrous king, he was, unlike Richard the Lionheart or Henry V, not a man to inspire confidence on the battlefield (or off it, either).
Yet some historians argue that his poor reputation as a military leader is undeserved; that he was, in fact, ‘a shrewd strategist’, that ‘the inference he was a feeble soldier is false’, that he was ‘skilled in siegecraft’ and that his military plans ‘came incredibly close to success’.52 In other words, he does not deserve his sobriquet, bestowed upon him by Gervase of Canterbury, of ‘Softsword’. His campaign of 1215–16 may offer some support for this view, as even many of John’s modern-day detractors concur that it was a total success.
By 1212, John had gained mastery over the British Isles. It was a short-lived triumph. A Welsh revolt demanded an immediate response. His first move was typically hard-hearted: killing the hostage sons of one of the Welsh leaders – two died after castration; the seven-year-old was hanged. His planned expedition to Wales was cancelled when he uncovered a baronial plot to assassinate him (or to abandon him to the Welsh). A carefully prepared French invasion of 1213 was successfully prevented by a combination of decisive military action (his half-brother William Longsword destroying the French fleet at Damme) and by supine diplomacy (John’s submission of his realm as a fief of the Pope). John, in turn, placed high hopes on an Anglo-Imperial invasion of France in 1214, but the well-funded expedition was disastrously ended by defeat at the battle of Bouvines. Demands on the baronage to provide the finances for this disastrous campaign increased the number of baronial dissidents and finally provoked them into outright rebellion in May 1215. London opened its gates to the rebels, an early boost that did just a little to offset the extensive network of royal castles and foreign mercenaries being brought into the country to fight for John. A state of phoney war permitted time for the talks that led to Magna Carta in June, by which the barons hoped to restrain John’s capricious and high-handed style of government and to ease their tax burden. John only signed the charter as a temporary, delaying measure, and repudiated it the following month, thus precipitating the war proper in September. John’s new papal ally saw to it that the dissident barons were excommunicated; this did not, however, prevent the rebels from calling their forces the ‘Army of God’. The rebels looked for allies of their own, enlisting the help of Alexander II of Scotland and enticing Prince Louis of France to aid them with the prospect of the throne. But Louis’ main force would not arrive until well into the following year.
The barons had need of the French. Although strong in the North and East, they had little to match the resources at John’s disposal, which were augmented further by his raiding of dissident estates near at hand and taking rebel castles in the South; John also had the strength of some 150 royal castles strategically placed throughout the country. The castles would be important for John’s march up and down the country over winter, providing secure bases and field troops. The rebels held Rochester for a while, losing it to John by December after a dramatic siege. It was here that John was talked out of hanging the garrison by his captains, concerned that they might receive the same treatment if caught. Crucially, the rebels maintained their position in London where they received an advanced expeditionary force from Louis. In the North, King Alexander of Scotland went on the warpath and the northern barons made their submissions to him. On 20 December, John held a council of war at St Albans. A chronicler tells us that his primary concern was to find the means by which he could pay his mercenaries to defeat the barons. He split his army in two. One half, under William Longsword and John’s senior mercenary captains, successfully subdued rebel hot spots in the South while containing the main force within London. Needless to say, they did this by
sword and fire, as at Ely in Cambridgeshire, where Ralph of Coggeshall reports royalist soldiers burning the place: ‘[T]hey made great slaughter, as they did everywhere they went, sparing neither age, nor sex, nor condition, nor the clergy’.53 John’s role was to accomplish the same in a campaign northwards into rebel territory. It was a ravaging campaign the like of which England had not experienced in over half a century.
Rebel estates were torched and their castles taken. The garrison at Belvoir in Leicestershire surrendered when John threatened to starve to death their lord, William of Albiny, whom he had captured at Rochester. Such was the ferocity of the march that castle after castle was abandoned to him, and town after town hurried to open its gates to him. Anonymous of Béthune informs us that the constable of Pontefract placed himself at the King’s mercy, while York paid John one thousand pounds to regain his goodwill. Roger of Wendover reports that the commanders of the baronial castles, ‘when they heard of the king’s advance, left their castles untenanted and fled to places of secrecy, leaving their provisions and various stores for their approaching enemies’.54 Coggeshall confirms the efficacy of John’s terror tactics: ‘The king and his army … depopulated the lands of the barons, incessantly dedicated to plunder and burning…. The Northern barons fled before his face while a few submitted themselves to the mercy of the merciless one.’55 So swift was his progress that by 8 January he was outside Durham. From here he rushed to Newcastle when he learned that Alexander had set it alight. In retaliation, John burned and destroyed Berwick, a Scottish chronicle speaking of slaughter and torture.